


la troisième

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Era, Gender Dysphoria, Multi, Other, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 04:37:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2096037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Enjolras,” Combeferre said. “Are you quite well?”</p><p>Enjolras said nothing. His eyes were lowered, and his brows drawn down over them. After a moment, they lifted. “Not precisely.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	la troisième

 

**APRIL 1832**

“Have you a moment?” Enjolras asked quietly. “Later tonight, when our business here is done.”

Combeferre gave him a surprised look. Enjolras did not have a great deal of time for anything extraneous lately, and still less for anything that smacked of the social. “Of course. Here?”

“In my rooms.”

Enjolras lived alone. It was something Bossuet or the others made occasional sport of, Enjolras in lone splendour, without a mistress or a brother Ami to share his lodgings or his floor. Courfeyrac could afford to live alone in the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques, but he was still wrapped in the beating social heart of the city. Enjolras lived further away in the Saint-Séverin, a withdrawing that was a necessary retreat.

Combeferre followed him home through the streets. Sometimes they walked together, talking as they went. Not tonight. Enjolras walked at a clipped pace when his mind was full of something, and tonight his long legs ate up the distance and left Combeferre trailing far behind. There'd been little time for discussion lately, and less still for content. Enjolras burned so brightly through these spring days of burgeoning unrest, as though he was only too aware that his wick was trimmed short from the start.

He had left the door unlatched behind him, and Combeferre made his own way into the sitting room.

Enjolras was standing there, his hair red-gold in the lamplight. It rippled loose past his shoulders, freed from its tie. His cravat was already abandoned over the arm of an armchair, which was no surprise to Combeferre. He'd shed his coat, and unbuttoned his waistcoat. That was unusual. Enjolras wasn't often found in his shirtsleeves. Even in the heat of summer, he was proper.

“Enjolras,” Combeferre said. “Are you quite well?”

Enjolras said nothing. His eyes were lowered, and his brows drawn down over them. After a moment, they lifted. “Not precisely.”

“A medical concern?”

“You could say that.” He bit his lip. “I'd better show you. It's easier, I think.”

Combeferre waited, and Enjolras began to flick open the small mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt. The quick, impatient movements failed to reveal his skin, only his undershirt; then he pushed shirt and waistcoat off, and revealed not an undershirt, but tight-wound bandages.

“Have the bindings been giving you trouble? What happened to the corset?”

“I couldn't lace it,” Enjolras said. He glanced at Courfeyrac warily. “I could hardly go shopping for underwear for some imagined fiancée's trousseau and demand another to my specifications. It would raise eyebrows, I think.”

“Your requirements wouldn't strike quite the right amorous note,” Combeferre agreed. “We could order it by mail from Bordeaux, as we did with the last?”

“The corset is not the problem,” Enjolras said. “Although it's certainly seen better days. It's the problem _with_ the corset.” He frowned again. 

Then he started to remove the bandages.

“Oh,” Combeferre said when he was done. The exclamation was inadequate to its purpose.

Enjolras had never had much in the way of bosom. It had allowed him to bind what he did have down to the point of invisibility, and to pass as the man he wasn't, but should have been. Combeferre had known him since childhood, and in truth, he'd rung a far falser note as a young woman. It wasn't unexpected for a young man to offer his opinions, or to spend hours reading Prudhomme's published papers and cramming Latin; but all bluestockings must put on silk stockings in the end. Not Enjolras.

Now his thin boy's chest, with only its slight hints of softness, had become a woman's. He could mark the changes. He'd tended Enjolras through fever and through injury, and through the bayonet-cut across his ribs that was a slice of faded silver now. Without the corset, he might have been another casualty of that bright doomed July two years previous.

The other change was slight. To a stranger, it would not be particularly noticeable. A problem of posture, perhaps, to be corrected by a straightened spine and an indrawn breath – if Enjolras had ever slumped. 

“Indeed,” Enjolras said. He pulled his shirt together, and began to refasten the buttons. Then he stopped, and raised an eyebrow. “Unless – do you require to examine–?”

“I haven't trained extensively in obstetrics,” Combeferre said helplessly. He didn't consider it beneath him, but the faculty did. “Does it seem to be in order?”

“How should I know?”

“Come here.”

Warily, Enjolras drew closer. 

His averted cheek had the pure line of a choirboy's. His abdomen was warm and taut under Combeferre's hand; it answered his palpations with firmness. Combeferre had no feeling for a living woman, but he'd had experience with dissection. He shut his eyes and tried to imagine under his fingertips a second beating heart. The curve of limb and head, the snakelike curl of the umbilicus. Warm with life, not waxy with death. “Have you been ill?”

“Often,” Enjolras admitted. His mouth compressed. “My appetite has been lacking lately. I thought, perhaps the water –”

Combeferre took his hand away. “ _Enjolras_ ,” he said, and stopped pretending that this was nothing out of the ordinary. “How long?”

Enjolras kept his face averted, and was silent. At last – “December.”

“It's April – can you be sure?”

“It was only once. I could hardly be wrong.”

“Four months. You couldn't have told me before now?”

“I didn't notice until I couldn't get my laces tied. I truly didn't.”

Combeferre had been controlling the questions and expostulations that wanted to spurt out of him, but now they burst forth: “Didn't you even _think_ of taking precautions?”

“I told you. It was only once.”

Combeferre closed his eyes. There was no point crying over spilt milk, or spilled seed, when it was far too late to do any good. In any case, most precautions proved less than universally efficacious. He wasn't going to take Enjolras further to task over this; that wouldn’t help at all. “Early or late December?”

“Early,” Enjolras said, “although I can't see – You can still mend matters, can't you?” He made an imprecise gesture with his hand. _Make it go away,_ it suggested. “There are ways. I've heard of them.”

“There are ways,” Combeferre agreed, mild despite his immediate reaction to Enjolras's invocation. “Nothing that I can help you with.”

“Don't give me Popish moralities. It's not a child yet.”

“That's not why.” 

“Isn’t it?”

“Enjolras. Don’t ask me this.”

“I must. I’m sorry, Combeferre, but I must.”

“Do you know what you’re asking? The Hippocratic Oath has a clause against the procurement of abortion. Do you know why we swear that? It's part of the first promise: _First, do no harm._ It's not the child that concerns me, but the patient. We swear not to cut men for the stone for the same reason: the remedy is often far more fatal than the cure. When the prospect of healing doesn't balance the scale –”

Enjolras said, “There are methods. Medicines.”

“Yes, the herbs desperate women get from some archwife – I've had innumerable cadavers of their providing laid out for me on the table. I've taken them apart with a knife to study the infants still curled fast in their wombs. They die of convulsions. It's still a better death, I think, than the ones who go to some butcher and die in the middle of more blood than I could have imagined their bodies could hold. Do you know how that's done? Fumbling, in the dark, by idiots who haven't even my limited familiarity with the female body –”

Enjolras was whiter than usual. “I don't care.”

“How do you imagine I would live with myself if I botched it? If I cut a vein and you bled out – if you took infection –” Combeferre took another harsh breath, trying not to imagine an Enjolras paler still, the colour of a plaster-cast, lying on some student's table. Another nameless body, another social delinquent found in some alley or backroom.

“And if I went elsewhere?” Enjolras asked, still blanched, but with his jaw set. “If I put on skirts and found one of those women, or claimed I needed it for some amour –”

“You would have the expanded option of whether to die bleeding, or in fits,” Combeferre said flatly. He'd seen too many women dead. Someone had to consider what would be safest, because Enjolras himself never would. It was too long for safety now. December. “The blood won't be on my hands directly, but do you imagine I won't feel it?”

“If I asked,” Enjolras said harshly. He didn't finish his question.

“I won't deny you. I would rather do my poor best for you than trust you to some hack.” Combeferre took a breath. “I will never forgive you if you ask that from me.”

“I don't expect that would matter to me much if I'm dead, or I’ve come through it alive,” Enjolras said, thoughtfully.

He could be horrifically single-minded sometimes. He had one of the most lucent minds Combeferre had ever had the privilege of entering into conversation with, but it went deep, not broad. His eyes were fixed on the chosen goal, and he rarely calculated the collateral or the expanding and interwoven questions and moral issues that stood between him and his purpose. He was Alexander faced with the Gordian Knot: Combeferre could spend a lifetime following each thread through its winding coils to its end, but Enjolras would rather hack through the bindings with a sword.

“The father.” One thread of the tangle. “Will he marry you?”

“What?”

“You asked for my medical opinion, and my medical opinion is that in five months, or a little more, there will be a child, Enjolras,” Combeferre said. “That fact must be faced.”

Although with his shirt closed up again, that fact was obscured. The bindings were still lying on the table; the curve of his breast showed through the loose linen, but nothing below. “The father is not in question,” Enjolras said.

“Are you going to give me a name?”

Enjolras snorted. “What would you do with it? Threaten him?”

“I'd have Bahorel do it for me,” Combeferre said, considering. “Grantaire, perhaps. I would hint at some dark republican purpose for the roughing-up, of course –”

“Oh, of course,” Enjolras said. The colour had come back into his face in a patchy red flush. He glanced away. “I told you. The question of paternity does not arise.”

“It falls to me to marry you, then.”

Enjolras laughed, then stifled it. Combeferre raised an eyebrow at him.

“That's not the reaction I expected to my first proposal of marriage.”

“You sounded like a doomed man on his way to the tumbril,” Enjolras made his excuses. “Oh, I wish your mother was here to hear you – and to offer all the swooning you require. She loathed me.”

“Not true – when you were still a sweet little girl with fair ringlets, I believe she cherished hopes of our eventual union.” Combeferre sighed again. “Of course, then you grew up – ”

“You prefer me as I am,” Enjolras told him. He shook his hair back, the rippling gold framing the white throat that still signified the girl he'd been. “I prefer myself this way.”

“I did mean it,” Combeferre said, returning to serious matters. It was true that he enjoyed seeing Enjolras as the person he'd always been meant to be, and he'd never grudged whatever aid he could provide, even for a moment; but Enjolras had to see that this – this _child_ – changed things. Had altered his course. “Whatever's necessary – we could go away from Paris, and I could set up as doctor in some smaller city; even a town. They'd accept you as my wife without question, if the fact was already established.”

Enjolras sobered too. “Oh, my friend,” he said. “Forgive my laughter.” He pressed Combeferre's hand. “It means much, that you'd make that offer.”

“But you won't accept it?”

“Of course not.” Enjolras licked the part of his lips. His brows drew together; he was looking past Combeferre now, not at him. “I would no more let you abandon your life and your work than I could abandon mine. We're so close, Combeferre. I've been in contact with the Amis du Peuple – I should not say as much, but the carbonari link us all – and the carbines flood Paris. The silk-workers in Lyon may rise, and carry our cause beyond the city itself. It's a matter of weeks now, not months. If not June, it must be July.”

In June he'd be entering his sixth month. Combeferre was not sure whether to mention this or not. “Nevertheless.”

“You must be truly concerned for my safety to offer me marriage. To imagine that the preferable course.”

It was a strange alchemy of mind they often shared, to know what the other thought before he spoke. “Yes.”

“I won't visit any angel-makers without your leave.”

That wasn’t the same as a promise not to visit them, and Enjolras knew as well as Courfeyrac how easily their opinions came to inform each other’s. “Thank you,” Combeferre said simply.

Enjolras pressed his hand again, and Combeferre glanced down at his slim white fingers. “Perhaps the revolution will come first and the world will be changed. I'll deal with what's important before the other.”

That was no provision at all, to avoid making provision, but Combeferre accepted it for now.

 

**DECEMBER 1831**

Grantaire was drinking in the backroom of the Café Musain, under the faded map of France. At some point one of the young hotheads was going to notice that he'd used small silver pins to mark out the borders of the late Empire at its height, a palimpsest of past glories laid over the older bounds of virtue under the republic. He looked forward to that day. Perhaps, if Courfeyrac's lapdog wasn't in attendance, he could lay the blame on young Pontmercy and let the affronted pigeons scatter and squall.

'Enjolras was sitting in his accustomed place in the corner, reading some tract or other. What a shame he wasted his spectacular mind on such pedantry. It was made to soar, yet he kept its wings clipped. There were whole libraries of beauty closed to him; books of poetry going back centuries into antiquity, books in English and books in Greek, books in Italian and in Spanish and in Aramaic. Sonnets. Devotional prayers. Fairy-tales and romances in little books covered in blue sugar-paper. To be sure, Grantaire hadn't opened the Aramaic, but he had Prouvaire to gloss for him. There was so much that was sublime already in the world, and no time to read it all – why did Enjolras waste his time on grubby pamphlets and schoolboy rhetoric, the dirty cut-and-thrust between the _National_ and the _Constitutionnel?_

Still, he made a handsome ornamental sculpture in his corner. A Praxitelean prop. With the brooding look on his lovely face today, he was Antinous with a touch of Werther.

He needed cheering.

Grantaire swaggered over to his corner and took the empty seat. He straddled it backwards, and put his elbows on the table's edge. “Dear darkness,” he said. “What causes the sun to disappear behind the cloud?”

“Currently?” Enjolras asked, glancing up. “You.”

“How lucky you are that I presented the cheek expecting it to be slapped,” Grantaire told him, unperturbed. “Does it cheer you? You may do it again.”

Enjolras returned his regard to his pamphlet.

“Don't be boring, Phoebus. Bathe me in your radiance.” When Enjolras continued to ignore him, Grantaire leaned forward until their foreheads were almost touching. He tapped the top of the paper. “What are you reading? Is it interesting?”

“You wouldn't find it so,” Enjolras said, leaning back. He gave Grantaire another austere look. A lock of curling hair had broken free from its fellows and fallen into his eyes. It mitigated, somewhat, his severity. “There's nothing here that would find your favour. I include not only my reading matter, but this table – this room in general. Paris itself, as its tenor changes.”

“It wounds me when you imply that I am unlearned,” Grantaire said. He let the sharper statements pass unmarked. “I would have you know that I picked up a novel the other day, and didn't even strain myself in the doing thereof. _Sarrasine_ , by that fellow who wrote the _Comédie humaine_ – It strikes me that you would find it strangely intriguing. It's about a young artist,” he added, waving aside Enjolras's muttered comment about the dubious virtue of the novel form (‘ _Romans pour les femmes de chambre’_ ). “A fellow I have considerable sympathy for. He pursues an actress who disdains him cruelly – indeed, when he pays his addresses, she holds him at bay with a dagger.”

“Was it effective?”

“Not particularly,” Grantaire admitted. “He promises to be as a brother to her, and then carries her off by force.”

“How is this tale supposed to be of use to me, then?” Enjolras asked, and then seemed to realise that he'd put his foot right in Grantaire's baited trap. His eyes closed, as if in prayer for patience.

“How very good of you to ask!” Grantaire said, tilting his chair forward. “The fair lady turned out to be no lady. Sweet Zambinella hid a secret under her skirts.” He sighed heavily. “Alas, our Sarrasine – I'm afraid he's not much of a romantic – would have slain him for it, only he was slain first.”

“What are you implying?” 

Enjolras sounded coldly furious, like the sudden warning hiss of the sword drawing from the scabbard. Grantaire's chair wobbled in shock.

He was surprised by the scale of the reaction he'd drawn. He'd expected further distant disdain, allowing him to muse at extended length on the curiosities of love, and the curiosities to be found beneath an actress's pantalettes, should said actress be virtuous enough to wear them, before returning to the curious attraction of one man for another. “Nothing, sweet light. I'd yet to get to the point where I explained that Zambinella was not only no woman, but a castrato. It was there I meant to make my stand.”

“Get out,” Enjolras said, but didn’t give him time to do so. His foot shot out and hit the precise point on Grantaire's chair required to send it flying backwards, and backwards Grantaire went, in a tangle of boots and chair legs and the flared skirts of his coat.

On the floor, he drew himself together. He extricated himself from the furniture, put his cravat in order, and beat the dust from his trouser-seat and his cuffs. There were friends at the other tables nearer the fire, and they were watching now, as they hadn't been at first – Grantaire baiting an Enjolras who barely troubled himself to rise to his lure was nothing out of the way, after all. They looked away when he met their eyes. Bahorel shrugged good-naturedly before he returned to his conversation, an acknowledgment that sympathised as it laughed and suggested that he'd received his due.

Enjolras was no longer paying any attention. He had returned to his reading as though Grantaire had never interrupted him at all.

“How lucky for me that you don't possess the power to banish men beyond the city limits,” Grantaire said into the silence, and bowed with fulsome deepness before he left.

-

That was a point to remember. _Not_ to mock Enjolras with talk of eunuchs, for all his self-restraint and self-imposed chastity, the burning eye that took in every detail of Paris but the women strolling its streets. Grantaire wondered what Enjolras truly saw when he looked past them. Did they vanish into the aether? Did they seem so much furniture, or did he simply not see them at all? Were they simply strangely-dressed men to him, no more and no less, deserving of none of the special regard a man of red blood would lavish on a pretty girl or naughty-eyed matron?

Sometimes Grantaire wasn't sure which he'd rather; to catch the stern column of marble in a moment of unbending, and know the show of virtue to be nothing but a whited sepulchre, or to know that it was truth. He _couldn't_ believe it, and hence he tested; and yet, it was somehow reassuring each time to be rebuffed. He didn't believe in purity in men – or women – and he didn't believe in what Enjolras preached. And yet there was Enjolras, and he was light in darkness, a solid point in a shaking world. Grantaire needed him even as he doubted him. That was why he would return, to be humiliated again, and arise reassured of Enjolras's strange continence, his absolute conviction.

He was still drinking at the Corinthe when Joly and Courfeyrac found him. They had the air of men who wanted to seem chance-met, but betrayed their purpose by the way they sought him with their eyes from the doorway before they made their way over to him.

“So,” Courfeyrac said, bright-eyed, and put a hand on his arm. “We didn’t see you tonight, mon compère. We were cruelly abandoned, in fact.”

“Rather, your master expelled me from your circle,” Grantaire said. “But you know that already, because I saw the glance you exchanged with Joly – That glance, precisely. Don’t tell me that your gossips haven’t brought you the tale twice over.”

“It’s your own fault,” Joly said, abandoning pretence. He signalled for more wine. There was no judgment in his tone, only mirth. “I must admit, calling Enjolras a castrato–”

“I hadn’t yet reached that point in my exposition,” Grantaire complained, with considerable sorrow. “If such was his reaction only for talking of _les romans_ , what would that have drawn?”

“Better not to know,” Courfeyrac advised, and then laughed. “A wise man would quail at the thought, capital R, and here you sit, looking wistful! A man may wear that look for a maid; for Enjolras’s sake, it’s singularly inappropriate.”

“If only he was a woman,” Joly added. “That would regularise the matter.”

Joly's notions of propriety were occasionally overly bourgeois. Grantaire made a face at him. “Is it natural for one man to live in another’s pocket, the way you and Lesgles haunt each other? Think on that.”

“I don’t dwell in Bossuet’s pocket,” Joly said, with dignity. “Only my spare latchkey does.”

“Enjolras would make a truly terrible woman,” Courfeyrac mused, turning his eyes to heaven at the thought.

“You'd make a better one, fashion-plate,” Joly said, no doubt meaning to score a point, but Courfeyrac said, “So I would!” and smoothed the lapels of his brightly-patterned waistcoat with proprietary pride.

“If a maiden, you'd be a Maupin,” Grantaire said, “sneaking into some convent to debauch the virgins –”

“Undoubtedly.” His dark eyes sparkled at the thought. “You half-tempt me to put on skirts and ravish schoolgirls.”

“Do you need such tempting?”

“Not at all –”

“ _Du vin,_ ” Joly said, and poured for them all. Courfeyrac stopped his fancying long enough to press a sou on the serving-maid, and when she'd left them, leaned back in his chair and said,

“No, the problem lies with Grantaire. Such rough wooing would see him cruelly rebuffed in an _affaire de coeur_ no less than when offered as insolent service to our dear _coureur de tête._ ”

“Are you suggesting I court his regard with sycophant words? He'd rather I spoke what I thought than lie in a sweet voice.”

“I think Enjolras would prefer you didn't speak at all,” Joly said, and patted Grantaire's arm at whatever look crossed his features. “Don't despair, grand-R. You will always have the entrée among our number. What did the saint of Clairvaux say of the heathen? They are not to be hurt; they are to be converted.”

“If Enjolras wishes to convert, he'd receive better results for his labours training up the Pontmercy pup that runs at Courfeyrac's heels,” Grantaire said. “To alter in one's principles, one must have principles to begin with. I have none.”

“He doesn't run at my heels any longer,” Courfeyrac said, and bent closer to share news of Marius and his amour.

Somewhat later, after a quantity of wine had been drunk, the missed meeting discussed, and Joly teased at length over his latchkey's loose ways before he took himself home to meet his mistress's expectations of the hours he kept – why keep a mistress at all, if you did her bidding as you would a wife's? – Grantaire found himself confessing to Courfeyrac that he'd once had a dream where Enjolras was a woman. He was more than a little drunk even by his own measure, or he would not have shared such material for future mockery.

– “Or dressed as one, at least, but a man entire under his skirts, like Achilles in the women's quarters. After reading that novel, in fact; that was why I mentioned it.”

“And I’ve had dreams where I sat down to tea with pink sugar-mice I let drink from my saucer,” Courfeyrac said, and made a face of his own. “Do I share that with my friends? I do not.”

“You would have me hold my tongue?”

“I would,” Courfeyrac said. He clapped Grantaire on the shoulder. “And on that note, mon ami, I will follow our jolly example and take myself home. Surely our conversation can only decline from this point.”

It was one thing to drink alone and feel yourself thrown off by friends. It was another to be joined by them, and to warm your hands and heart in their regard, which drove them to check that his latest tilt against the windmill hadn't quite killed his spirit. One could not keep drinking in their wake with the same determined bent towards oblivion.

Grantaire would take himself home. It was a route that would lead him past the Café Musain, and should a light still glow in its back room – well.

 

**MAY 1832**

Enjolras did not look well. There were lavender-blue shadows under his eyes like bruises. The bones stood out under his skin. His face seemed to have somehow come into focus, as when one closed one eye and stared hard at a particular object; as when a painting in oils was translated into lithograph.

The colour had gone from it first, and then, slowly, the softness of the tissue. It was almost like trying to recall a dream, to bring to mind the Enjolras of some five years previous, when Grantaire had first made his acquaintance. He’d not believe it himself if he hadn’t committed it to paper, and to canvas, and to silver plate. Enjolras looked perhaps twenty now, and claimed twenty-six. In 1827 he’d claimed twenty-one and looked all of fifteen, a boy cut loose too soon from his tutor’s care. _Un bel adolescent_ , with a fair flower-like face and the sweetest mouth in the world, who spoke only briefly, and in sharp starts, and went scarlet when Grantaire slid his thumb suggestively against his wrist upon first shaking his hand.

Now – he was a grown man, undeniably, and a pale ascetic one, who drove himself too far, and too hard, and reminded Grantaire horribly of a wraith from _Le Radeau de la Méduse._ Not a pleasant association to make. To fix his dying men on canvas, Géricault had drawn corpses in the morgue, and patients in the hospital.

He was not going to comment. He was not going to express concern. Enjolras didn’t want those things from him, and he barely tolerated them from those with rather more right – Joly, Courfeyrac, Combeferre. Even Bossuet or Prouvaire sometimes stirred themselves to press his hand or shoulder and mutter, _avez-vous mangé_?

Grantaire was not going to join that circle of zealous nursemaids. Enjolras had been out of the schoolroom and in the world quite long enough to take care of his own person. If he chose not to – well. Grantaire would not paint portraits at _his_ sickbed.

“He doesn’t look well,” Joly said, tapping his cane against his chin. “I don’t like his look. It suggests biliousness, or perhaps _la tuberculose_? I wonder if he would let me bleed him.”

“Revolutionary fervour sits poorly with the digestion,” Grantaire said dismissively, and Joly jostled him with his elbow. “Republicanism is corrosive to the stomach lining. It sticks in the throat and in the craw.”

“Ah, I quite see – every time your wine meets the cobbles, you are heaving up Jacobinism inadvertently swallowed?”

“I never swallow anything without intent,” Grantaire said, and jostled him back. “He’s fine. Physick yourself, physician.”

It was doubtless due to an excess of demagoguery, anyway. What Enjolras needed was distraction. That, Grantaire could provide.

“What are you doing?” Combeferre said, drawing him aside somewhat later. Grantaire blinked at him innocently, “Stop baiting him. He doesn’t need you making a nuisance of yourself.”

“You fuss,” Grantaire said. “Unduly. I simply seek to stir him up, like a hot poker in wine – welcome on a winter's night.”

“It's summer,” Combeferre said shortly. “Leave him be.”

A few days later, Courfeyrac tugged on his hair to get his attention. It hurt. It pricked memories of another hand in his hair, coiling and then pulling tight –

“Haven’t I told you already that the way to court our _cher commandant_ is to smooth his feathers, not cause them to crest?”

“I don’t know why you think I want his regard,” Grantaire said. “Surely, if I did –”

“You want it,” Courfeyrac said, with unwanted – if not unwonted – astuteness. “You don’t hope for it, however, and have therefore yielded all expectation in order to seek his attention as a substitute – but it won’t suffice, my friend. Abandon this course, and try another.”

Grantaire ignored him, and drank some more. He’d been drinking deeply in recent months. He was plagued by half-tangible dreams and tangled desires, and he felt like he might be going mad by slow degrees.

It had been a good dream, the one that haunted him. Less a matter of libidinous speculation than image and sensation, more real than waking. Colour and texture. Himself pressing Enjolras against the wall, and being permitted to so press; kissing him, and being permitted to kiss. Pinning him and getting a hand into his trousers, meaning only to test for some sign that this yearning was mutual, that Enjolras was man and not marble – only that –

“Why are you teasing Enjolras?” Bossuet asked, some days later, a little of his customary good humour evaporated. “You shouldn’t. Things are coming together. The time for play –”

“Didn’t Caesar toss the dice before crossing the Rubicon? Play stops with life itself.”

“Still,” Bossuet said. The unhappy fret of his brow communicated itself up his forehead and across his skull in a truly fascinating concatenation. “Try to be a little serious, or you’ll be tossed out – and no one will speak for you. Not right now. Not with the hour so close.”

Grantaire was tempted to enlarge on the unlikeliness of that golden hour ever to come, not least because it would be amusing to see if the wrinkles could advance their borders further still, but – he _was_ likely to be thrown out. The backroom of the Café Musain had become a powder keg. It needed only a spark for explosion.

Enjolras was sending Combeferre to Picpus; Courfeyrac to the polytechnique; Feuilly to the glass-makers. Prouvaire to the Freemasons. Everyone had their task but Grantaire; the omission was pointed. No one looked his way when Enjolras finished speaking, but it was Courfeyrac who questioned him.

“Is that all?”

“No,” Enjolras said. He hesitated slightly. “There remains the Barrière du Maine. I had intended Marius to take that part –”

“Marius is tired of us,” Courfeyrac said with feigned sadness; he caught Grantaire’s eye and gave him the ghost of a hinted wink. “He has cast us off for love’s sake. He gathers honeydew on Olympus instead of practicing with his sword on the fields of Mars.”

There was chuckling, but it died at the sudden warning flicker of Enjolras’s eyes.

“What about me?” Grantaire said suddenly. “Send me. I’ll go.”

-

It wasn’t a private failure; that, Grantaire could perhaps have lived with. No, he allowed himself to be drawn into dominoes and drinking, and put aside all thoughts of grandiloquent speechifying; and then through the clouds of pipe-smoke saw a bright golden head, a pale frowning brow. 

Then it was gone.

Grantaire had been dreaming strange dreams lately. Things that couldn’t be true, couldn’t have happened. But he couldn’t have imagined seeing that. That, alas, was too frail a reed to grasp. That had been Enjolras, and that was the death of hope.

He bolted back the last of his glass and got to his feet.

“Where are you going?” his partner at dominoes enquired. “We’re still playing – you have money on the table – ”

“Keep it,” Grantaire said curtly, and knocked the game out of alignment in his rush forwards. It took him some time to catch Enjolras, but he could predict which streets he would take, his path – and none of the Amis knew Paris the way Grantaire did, even Bahorel. He knew it upside down, inside out, sideways and backwards; high places and low, the shining lantern-lit Rue de Rivoli and the dark and shadowy areas around the quais.

His Paris was a flexible thing; Enjolras’s was more fixed.

They were nearly at the Café when Grantaire caught him up. “Enjolras!”

He was heard. The set of Enjolras’s shoulders changed. But his pace didn’t stop, or slow, and Grantaire was forced to quicken his own to an undignified lope, to run him down like a half-bred cur bringing down a stag.

“Take your hand off me.”

“Let me explain –”

“What is there to explain? I saw.”

“I might have had some strategy, for all you know,” Grantaire said, hand still curled in Enjolras’s coat-sleeve. It was bitter, and it cut two ways. At Enjolras, for deducing in that single glance that he had no plan; at himself, for having no such strategy. “You are quick to judge me.”

“Slow,” Enjolras contradicted. “I’ve known you long enough to know you had no such design.” His mouth did something pinched that Grantaire had never seen it do before, and not for want of watching. “You never have a design, Grantaire. You react, and you reel from catastrophe to catastrophe, from sodden sleep to sodden sleep – but you don’t plan. You leave that to others.”

He’d never spoken with such open harshness before. His was a disapproval that conveyed itself largely by speaking looks; by scrupulous silences; by quiet asides. Today, however – _Are you good for anything?– You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!_

“When I went –” Grantaire said. His hand curled tighter. His knuckles went pale with the force of his intensity. “I intended to speak to them. Enjolras, I did.”

“I don’t blame you. I blame myself,” Enjolras continued. His voice was a whip. “I agreed to try you. I shouldn’t have. I should have known – You’re unreliable.”

It came out as bitter as Grantaire himself could have managed, and wholly unlike him. Enjolras reserved his passion for his cause, and had little to spare for anything else. This burst of anger was disproportionate for the fumbled meeting with the masons.

“Why,” he said, and his tone changed, became arch. It was the only part he could play; any other would see him at Enjolras's feet in the dust. “Enjolras! Did you have hopes of me?”

“Of course not.”

“You did, or you wouldn’t be so furious.”

Enjolras laughed shortly. “I have no hopes,” he said. “Now take your hand off me.”

"Shall I go to my knees for you in the street, and beg for forgiveness?"

That, unexpectedly, drew a reaction. Enjolras caught his breath. For a moment, with Grantaire's hand on his arm, he was less a god importuned than a captive caught.

"Oh," Grantaire said, with another change of tone, another sudden shift of vision. "I did, didn't I? That, at least - that was no dream. I went begging to you. _How_ you must despise me."

"It is forgotten," Enjolras said quickly.

"Not by me,” Grantaire said. That drove his prey from the covert. Enjolras flinched again, rising to this as he had not so much of Grantaire's dangled bait these days and weeks and months. "Your hand, in my hair. I remember _that_. Did you consent to try me then, sweet light?"

 

**DECEMBER 1831**

“No,” Enjolras said, when he glanced up from his work and found Grantaire propped unsteadily against the threshold. It was a negative of absolute denial. He should have gone straight home after the meeting, but there had been papers to commit to memory and put in the fire that he would not have dared carrying through the streets. His candle was several inches lower than he remembered it, and it had spilt over its own lip and dribbled liquid wax down its side and into its dish. Unfortunate. If he'd noticed, he would have trimmed the wick and saved some of its light.

What time was it?

“Half-past eleven, by my watch,” Grantaire said. His collar was disordered, and his hair slightly flat on one side, as though he'd been resting his head too long and crushed his curls. His chin was up, pugnacious. “You brought matters to resolution quite tidily tonight, it seems.”

“No doubt encouraged by your absence,” Enjolras said. That brought Grantaire's chin down a fraction, and he looked almost as crestfallen as he had when Enjolras had sent him crashing to the floor, sprawled on his back.

Combeferre had told him once that turtles would stay in that position forever if not helped, possessing no power to right themselves. He was a fount of information when it came to animalia and the secret life of insects. He was currently interested in the luna moth, which lived only a few short days. It had no mouth, and took no food; it had only the one purpose, to mate, and then to die. That was what Enjolras had escaped, his intellect and his trousers protective colouring like a moth's dappled wings spread wide against bark.

“I'm glad to have been of service.”

“Through your absence?” Enjolras asked; then he sighed. It wasn't wholly fair to lash Grantaire for finding a mark he could not have imagined he would hit, and there was no point taking him to task when he was so sodden with wine that he'd remember little of it later. “You were missed. There was some wondering as to where you were.”

“No doubt eagerly answered by those who were present,” Grantaire said, and took another drink-deliberate step forward into the room.

That was the problem with Grantaire. He never missed a moment's slackening, and never failed to press an advantage, to advance a frontier.

When he spoke again, he was plaintive. “Did you have to send me flying? I have little enough dignity as it is.”

“You'd have more, did you drink less. Don't blame others for what you cast to the wind.”

“Unkind,” Grantaire said, and moved closer. His eyes were curiously intent, his red mouth wet and twisted a little to the side. “How else should I salve my wounds, but with the flagon? Would you deny me that much ease?”

Too close. For a moment Enjolras had the bizarre notion that Grantaire was about to embrace him, and then he nudged the table aside, dropped to his knees before him, and set his rough-knuckled hands around Enjolras's booted ankles. 

“What do you think you're doing?”

“Kick me,” Grantaire said, turning his eyes up to his. They were a very pale blue in the flickering light, out of tune with the gold the candlelight brought out in his skin and the red it brought out in his untidy dark hair. His wasn't a classic profile; his nose had been broken too many times. “Put your toe in my ribs when I need rebuking – I am a cur, after all. Only, when I please you – could you not say, _good dog,_ and touch my hair? I could live forever on that little.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Enjolras asked, but it was less of a question this time. “What have I ever said to make you think I would welcome such abasement from any man?”

“You call it abasement; I would call it fealty,” Grantaire said. His chin butted against Enjolras's knee. “A man needs a master, and as little as you believe that – as little as you aspire to the part – ” He bent his head in suggestion.

Enjolras put his hand in his hair and brought his eyes up again. It was soft in his hand, but it had the power to make Grantaire lift his face when he didn't mean to; a silken power that coiled around Enjolras's fingers, that must bite hard against Grantaire's scalp. “You don't believe in what I work for,” he said. “Why would you offer it such service?”

“I offer _you_ ,” Grantaire said. “Not – revolution, and freedom for all, and your quaint belief that in other hands the government of France would turn on its head and suddenly meet all its citizens' needs. It wouldn't, you know. The problem doesn't come from the top; the canker goes all the way down.”

“Shut up,” Enjolras said. Wondrously, Grantaire did. “You can't split that infinitive. I can't be divided from what I am – what I believe.”

Grantaire winced when Enjolras's fingers tightened in his hair. He hadn’t meant to do it, so Enjolras touched his cheekbone with his thumb in brief apology. He regretted it when Grantaire stared up at him with all his fuddled confused soul in his eyes again. 

“Yes,” he breathed. “Like that.”

“I didn't mean,” Enjolras said. _Only, when I please you_ – He let go, but Grantaire stayed on his knees with his face tilted up to him like a beggar’s. This was ludicrous. “Get up!”

“Happily,” Grantaire said, and did, with the sudden lithe grace that belied how much he'd drunk. He had that trick of being more flexible than one expected, in mind as well as body. This was a new turn, however; a new twist in that corkscrew brain, that bore through as it turned. He swayed a little on his feet. He was standing over Enjolras, now. “Happily –”

When Grantaire bent to kiss him, it was a chaste thing that was doubtlessly meant to find Enjolras’s mouth, but mostly missed. He did it swiftly, like a thief, but seriously, like a man sealing a holy pledge, and then flinched back like he expected to be slapped.

Enjolras stared at him, his mouth prickling with sensation. Grantaire swayed a little, but stayed where he stood, waiting for his punishment.

Enjolras should slap him. 

That was how he was supposed to respond to unwanted advances. As a woman, at least, that was what he’d been taught. 

Were they unwanted?

He wasn't a woman, so he put his hand around Grantaire's neck and drew him back down. This time, guided, their mouths didn't miss. 

Enjolras had never kissed anyone before. No boys; no girls. It was a curious bind. In his current guise, the one had seemed impossible; the other not to his taste. It wasn't a lack he mourned, given what he gained from it. But this unexpected opportunity –

Grantaire kissed him back, cautiously at first, and then more confidently – not so much in belief as dizzily dispensing with it. He kissed like an experienced man. He tasted like wine, and as the kiss drew on, his tongue was present, and practiced. Without fully intending it, Enjolras rose from his seat to make the sharp angle less awkward and the kiss deeper, and that brought him flush against Grantaire, who made a pleased sound.

Suddenly it was out of his control; Grantaire slid his hands down Enjolras's back and hugged him in tighter to his body, and then kissed him again with a new and utterly smug lascivious relish, deeper. Enjolras's treacherous body flushed with arousal, which only infuriated – interested – him more.

Then Grantaire's hand slid from the small of his back and caressed his hip.

“Enough,” Enjolras said breathlessly, but Grantaire's hand had already found the buttons there and parted them from their snug buttonholes. Enjolras shoved at him, but Grantaire was intent on seeking, and when he didn't find what he sought –

“Angel,” Granaire said, stopping too late. His voice was slurred with surprise as well as alcohol. “Angel in truth – ? Where do you keep yourself? What sort of –” 

His hand slid lower. Then, abruptly, he went still. They were pressed together closely enough that Enjolras felt the sudden lock of his muscles like a second self. 

Grantaire's breath came shuddering against his throat. “ _Enjolras_ ,” he said, and stepped back slightly. His hand stayed in place, cupping Enjolras between his legs, holding absence and fullness at once. “Enjolras. Enjolras, what is this?”

“If you don’t know,” Enjolras said, somehow finding his composure again. Grantaire liked women as well as men. His voice was dry; his mouth, drier. “– I’ve been much-misled as to the breadth of your experience.”

“I am an experienced man; but this – ” 

He still sounded pole-axed, but his thumb slid down further, exploratory. 

Enjolras shuddered, and at this evidence of the impossible congruity of what he touched and what he saw, Grantaire’s mouth opened.

To stop it speaking, Enjolras leaned down and kissed him again.

 

**MAY 1832**

“Of course not,” Enjolras said, but if he'd been too quick before, he was too slow now. “How would I – why would I – ”

“I cannot comprehend,” Grantaire admitted. “I thought it half a dream – _you_ would surely never stoop to dally in the gutter.”

Enjolras drew himself up. In the early evening light he looked like an image in dusky watercolours, his fair hair turned a drab biscuit-colour, his face chalk-pale, his eyes shadowed hollows. His heavy blue paletot, inappropriate for spring, and yet constantly worn, looked almost black. “No,” he said. “I didn't seek it. I didn't want it.”

Grantaire dropped his hand from his arm as suddenly as if Enjolras had just burst into flame standing there in the street. “I,” he said. It was a hiccup of protest. “I could not – I _would_ not. Tell me I did not – ”

“You kissed me,” Enjolras said, with the same precise, splintered inflection. He glanced slightly to the side as he said it. “That's all. I don't hold it against you, but we won't discuss it again.”

Grantaire couldn't tell truth from fiction or up from down. He was too muddled in his memories. He remembered Enjolras's mouth opening to him like a flower to sunlight. He _remembered_ – no, he couldn't testify to more, because there he grew confused, as a man did when the dubious admixture of brandy and stout and absinthe was added on top of wine. He remembered softness, and shock, and a girl's milk-white thighs. Had he forced his kisses on Enjolras, and, sent away, found himself some cocotte to spend his balked and baffled lust upon?

No. He remembered being kissed with a curious searching delicacy, and then an untutored ardour; no whore alive could feign that response. That, at least – Enjolras lied; he had to be lying. Grantaire remembered Enjolras's hand cupped around his neck, his mouth on his. It was too persistent a memory to be false, however fragmented.

“No,” he said, with a firmness of his own. “If unsought – not unwanted.”

Enjolras's mouth thinned. “I said, we won't discuss it.”

"I've been thinking myself mad for months, and now we won't discuss it? You don't get to declare that by fiat, yourself alone. What price republicanism, little Bonaparte?”

Enjolras closed his eyes. He looked impossibly weary, and Grantaire felt resentful guilt, and unwanted concern. When he spoke again, it was softer.

“You don't look well. The Revolution is a cannibal. How many of the great men of '89 were still alive in '94? Precious few. Don't let her eat you up. She'll spit out your bones and not mourn your loss. An ungrateful bitch, your precious Patria.” He paused. “She’s gnawing at you already, though yet unborn.”

“I don't like your metaphors,” Enjolras said. He breathed in, and seemed to draw himself together. “Let it alone. Let me alone.”

Ten minutes before, Grantaire had been chasing him through the streets, willing to grovel for his mercy, and now Enjolras was asking a favour of him, in his own way. 

“Very well,” he said, unwillingly, and watched Enjolras ease fractionally, although he still seemed wary. “Much better forgotten, as far as you're concerned. Naturally. For me – somewhat the reverse.”

Enjolras looked away with obvious disgust at the thought of Grantaire turning that half-remembered scene over in his head like a treasure, which _hurt_ , and provoked him to add,

“I dream of mermaids, you know. Chimerical creatures, half-maids. Men with split-tails. Did your nurse read you Mme d'Aulnoy's tales when you were a little boy? I was always fond of Chevalier Fortuné, but I have a penchant for forward women who press their attentions on pretty young men. Particularly pretty young men with – ”

“Shut up,” Enjolras said, with tired explosiveness. “For God's sake – you can never draw the line, can you? You always force yourself where you're not wanted –”

“Don't hang that label on me,” Grantaire said, with his own banked anger. “Don't try to convince that you found me so unwelcome when I recollect quite otherwise–”

“What's going on here?” Combeferre said behind them. Enjolras startled visibly, and Grantaire felt that he must surely have, too. “Enjolras, what's this? I came to see how things went with the Courgarde – I didn't expect to find you arguing in the street.” His appraisal moved to Grantaire, and lingered.

“How does Picpus stand?” Enjolras asked, looking away and kindling with an instant flame; Grantaire was forgotten, blotted out in a heartbeat. That organ quickened only to the ringing peal of the tocsin. “What did they say? How did it –”

“A moment,” Combeferre said. He raised an eyebrow, and Grantaire suddenly wondered if the two of them practiced it on each other, sitting together when they seemed to be thinking of high and serious matters. “How did it go with the sculptors at the Barrière?”

The flame dampened; embers smouldered. “It didn't,” Enjolras said, and glanced back at Grantaire. “I went to see for myself, and found nothing.”

“Ah.” Combeferre looked enlightened. “And then proceeded to argue in the street; I follow the causality, if not the logic.” He was still looking at Grantaire. “Go home, Enjolras; I'll report to you shortly.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Combeferre said, and that tone seemed to be enough. Enjolras drew in his chin and strode off, the low hem of his greatcoat fluttering.

Grantaire shifted from one foot to another, ready to make his own flight. 

Combeferre put a staying hand on his arm. “Don't go just yet,” he said mildly. “Didn't we have a conversation last week about how you needed to leave Enjolras be?”

“What sweeping concern,” Grantaire said, and sneered. “Is he your _ami_ , or your amour?”

Combeferre was unassuming. His hair was a nondescript fawn, his features soft, his chin not particularly sharp, and his eyes hidden by his spectacles. He wasn't bad-looking, just forgettable. The quiet man in the corner, the quiet man in a crowd.

It was his mind that was a spinning clockwork marvel, somewhere between artifice and pure art. Now his hand bit into Grantaire's upper arm through the heavy cloth of his coat with a strength Grantaire had never suspected him of.

“Is he a man, or a maid?” Grantaire continued, chasing chimera, and caught a betraying flicker on his features. “Ah, I see. You know the answer.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Combeferre said coldly. The pressure of his fingertips was causing Grantaire pain now, but he wasn’t going to break the hold, however easily he could do so. “Why do you – _Oh_.”

“Oh?”

Combeferre shook his head, batting the question away, but his eyes were suddenly distant behind their glass. His mouth moved like he was doing sums. Then he shook his head again. “No,” he said, like a man dismissing a foolish fancy. His hand slackened. “Take yourself and your mouth off, capital-R, and return only when you feel more capable of civil discourse.”

“What do you imagine I’m proposing?” Grantaire asked. He hadn't imagined that flinch. “Do you think I’m suggesting that you have personal proof of Enjolras’s masculinity? Proof supplied, some might say, in the course of passion? Ah – yes, I can see you think so. What a vile calumny! I wouldn’t. I’m suggesting something rather more outré altogether.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“You know what I suggest. Avoid it how you will, but you know it. You are part of the masquerade, aren’t you? A necessary camouflage. _Mon cher ami de mes jours d'école_... but it’s _ma chère amie_. Isn’t it?"

"You are frequently amusing when you are outrageous," Combeferre said. His grey eyes had gone flinty. "You go too far now."

"I take improper liberties – with a lady's name? Or person. Say, person. _Quelle corps_ –!"

"What are you implying? _Precisely_?"

Grantaire clucked his tongue at him. "It's your turn – cards on the table, m'sieur, we'll compare hands."

"This is not some game of poker –"

"Are you asking, did I poke her?”

"Continue in this line, and I'll shoot you," Combeferre said evenly. “I will make certain to miss any particularly mortal point.” He was a mild-mannered man whose idea of a good time involved an unread treatise on corpuscles, or a new species of caterpillar to put under his microscope, and if he had an inch or two in height on Grantaire he entirely failed to match him in agility or brawn – but Grantaire believed him. And believing him, believed himself at last. When he spoke again, it was with less pretended archness, and with genuine intensity.

"Your anger betrays you. You _know_ , don’t you?"

"You're inebriated," Combeferre said. "Why this particular delusion?"

"I told you," Grantaire said. He kissed his fingertips. " _Quelle corps_!" That got the response he'd been seeking: pure fury. 

A strong emotion on a soft face. "You claim that?"

He tried to smirk. It came out wrong. He wasn't sure he wanted to claim it, after all, if the look on Combeferre's face was for his sake. "Perhaps I do."

"I would truly like to shoot you," Combeferre said, and the wonder was that it still sounded dispassionate. "Do you have any idea – of course, you wouldn't. You've never been up to the elbow in blood and gore trying to deliver a dead child –"

"No," Grantaire agreed, readily enough, and then – " _What_?"

“Quiet,” Combeferre said, with an asperity Enjolras himself might have envied. “We won’t discuss it. Not here.”

“You had better tell me exactly what you mean,” Grantaire said dangerously. What means he had to back up that threat, he didn’t know; he could hardly offer Combeferre violence. As well as strike a woman –

O God, a woman.

-

Grantaire followed him, stumbling, blind. It wasn't the wine that made him clumsy. Combeferre had seen him deep enough in his cups for that before, and he wasn't dipped anywhere as badly tonight. Enjolras must have found him at Richefeu's merely making his beginning – albeit a beginning that in other men would be an ending. Grantaire hadn't had time or chance to take himself off and get truly sodden. No, it was shock that kepts him mute and curiously obedient all the way to Combeferre's rooms, propelled along by a hand on his arm.

Enjolras's were nearby – nearly a stone's throw – but Combeferre had no intention of allowing Grantaire to confront him unversed or unchastened. He meant to get to the truth first.

The muteness didn't last.

“If this is some joke, you have a _vile_ sense of humour,” Grantaire said unsteadily. He could be dangerous even when he was a little drunk, and very dangerous when he was exceedingly drunk. A powder-train that might peter out peacefully, or fire at the wrong spark and end in ugly words or flying fists or threats of duellio. He wasn't stable, for all his passing fits of geniality. “One I never suspected you of, or we'd be better friends –”

“Hardly that,” Combeferre said, and unlocked the door. He kept two rooms; a study below, and a sitting bedroom above. It suited him to keep his work close to hand. He didn't suggest taking Grantaire abovestairs, although it was where his intimates were entertained.

“Dear God in Heaven,” Grantaire said, unnaturally devout. He was staring at a porcine fetus in a pickle-jar, a curiosity which Courfeyrac had found at a fair and bestowed on Combeferre as a cheerful paperweight. He'd kept it, for fondness's sake, and because it was what people expected of medical students despite the dawn of Reason. “What in seven hells is that?”

He looked yellow-white. A touch of jaundice, Combeferre thought, he would be liverish; and then realised that it was still shock. “Sit down.”

Grantaire sat, obediently. His eyes stayed fixed on the jar.

“It's not human,” Combeferre added, studying him. “Normally I'd recommend brandy, but in your case –”

“ _Yes_.”

It was probably unwise, but Combeferre went to the decanter and poured out a medicinal finger. If the addition of brandy-wine on top of whatever else he'd taken it made Grantaire ill, that was his affair. Combeferre was concerned with Enjolras's.

Grantaire drank, gratefully. If it didn't give him back all his colour, something of the waxy yellow left him. “I knew you were a kind man,” he said. Then he looked up, and his eyes were a true Parisian blue despite their raddled whites, cyanotic and quite fixed.

“Cards on the table,” Combeferre said, and sat himself. “Truth for truth.”

“Who starts?”

“You, I think.”

“Unfair.” Grantaire's short fingers turned his empty brandy-glass around in circles. “You hold all the cards. You know my secrets already. And more than mine.”

“Tell me straight, this time,” Combeferre said, “and I may even forbear to shoot you. Was Enjolras your lover?”

“Love?” Grantaire said, and laughed shortly. “No. Sport? My recollection is moth-eaten and airy in places – but what curious details I remember, you seem to confirm. Is he – is she –” The word seemed to clot in his throat.

“When?”

“Winter. Sometime before the year turned – December, thereabouts. I was hardly marking off the days. Even _such_ a day.”

That tallied. Incredibly, it tallied. How was it possible? Combeferre couldn't imagine. He couldn't, and yet as ineluctably as two and two made four, the abacus balanced. He'd read the greatest logicians, but logic failed him now, with Grantaire's battered and homely face before him. There was nothing there to draw Enjolras's eye despite himself, and when it came to ideals, Grantaire's character acted on Enjolras as a magnet – not to draw, but to repel. His mind went to force, but summarily dismissed it.

Grantaire was still looking at him like he could save or damn him with a word. 

Combeferre considered what Enjolras would wish him to say, and what was, perhaps, the right thing to say, and said, simply, “Yes. There is – there will be a child.”

In his time at the Necker, he'd seen the dead and dying, and the moment of transition. Something unfathomable passed from their faces. It was a similar sort of alteration he saw transforming Grantaire's features now, a sweeping change that carried all before it.

“He doesn't want it,” he added, before Grantaire could speak. “If he could be rid of it, he would.”

Feeling and movement returned; Grantaire jerked like someone had just run a sword through him. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.” With an effort – “Well. I can see why he wouldn't. _She_. She wouldn't." His mouth twisted. “Why should she want to be bound to me? Why should she wish to have my –” 

His voice broke on the word.

Combeferre did not feel unduly compelled to offer mercy, but he said, “I imagine it was more the child at all, not its parentage. He told me that the father did not factor.”

“Oh, in that case,” Grantaire said, with almost his old ironical turn. Then he said, “Father?” he said, and covered his face with his hands. “I can't be a father.”

Unfortunately, he concurred with Grantaire’s self-assessment, but nevertheless – “Do you think that's true? I can tell you that Enjolras has no desire to be a mother – nor a father. His suggestion for its future is to put the child on the parish, as Rousseau did with his offspring.”

Grantaire dropped his hands and lifted his face in another soundless exclamation.

“Yes; quite.”

“She can't really mean that –”

“Enjolras doesn't often say what he doesn't mean.”

“You wouldn't let her –”

“I don't give Enjolras orders,” Combeferre said sharply. “I suggest that you don't try, either.” He unbent a little – this was why he had breached a confidence and a trust he'd kept for over six years, after all – and added, “I’ve begun searching for suitable households where the child might be reared.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Thank you.”

Combeferre shrugged his awkward gratitude away. “I didn't do it for you. Much depends, of course, on how matters fall out. The situation is not without its dangers.”

It was fascinating seeing how many alterations a man's face could undergo in so short a space. Confusion; then something closer to horror than shock this time. “You mean –”

“I mean, don't try my patience,” Combeferre said levelly. “He's my very dearest friend, and you have put him at risk. If anything goes wrong, I’ll hold you to account.”

This threat seemed to make Grantaire himself again. He leaned back and crossed his ankles. One tufted dark brow rose. “It requires two backs to make the beast, my poor innocent.”

“You have a responsibility. Do you deny it?”

A pause. Then the cynicism, too, slid away. His usual insouciant slouch, barely reassumed, became something painfully straight; his chin lifted; his features tried to school themselves into a trustworthiness that was belied by the bloodshot melancholic eyes and the rough chin, the mouth that could not compress itself into discipline. “No; I do not, and I will not. I have done wrong; I will do right. The least I can do is give the child a name.”

It would be improper to laugh at Grantaire's sudden and unprecedented desire to shoulder a burden. Still, the idea was so ludicrous that it took Combeferre some effort not to, and he forgave Enjolras for his amusement at his own proposition some weeks before. “You want to marry him?”

“Her,” Grantaire said. That was another pitfall he would have to discover for himself. Combeferre couldn’t keep warning him of every snare. “It’s what must be done, isn't it?”

By all means,” Combeferre said. “Make your proposals; but if you go to see Enjolras, you had better be sober. I know how rare it is to catch you in such a state; you must induce it. Don't drink tonight, and in the morning, _if_ you are entirely sober, and _if_ you promise to behave, I will allow you to speak to him.”

“Who are you to play Janus?”

“His dearest friend – and one who has offered him marriage already.” 

That struck a spark. Grantaire sprang to his feet. “That wasn’t your right –”

“You weren’t there.”

“I would have been, if I’d known.”

“Nevertheless. I advise you not to suggest it. Enjolras would have you no more than he would have me.”

“Oh, he’s had _considerably_ more of me,” Grantaire said, and now along with outrage his voice trembled on the edge of insinuation as it had done in the Saint-Séverin. “Unless you – do you suggest –?”

“I consider him a brother.”

“Say rather, a sister.”

“Never that,” Combeferre said judiciously. “I have sisters. Enjolras was always something else.”

Grantaire looked like he didn’t know what to do with that statement. It took the air out of him, and the indignation with it. He sat down again, hard. “Oh, God,” he said, and put his head again in his hands. 

“Call at ten,” Combeferre said, getting to his feet. He touched the man’s shoulder. “I’ll talk to him.”

 

**APRIL 1832**

“We had better make true confirmation,” Enjolras said. He wasn't looking forward to it, but Combeferre looked more apprehensive still, and at Enjolras's words he paled.

“We had,” he agreed, setting down his book. A text on midwifery; a new preoccupation. They'd been reading in the front room of Enjolras's lodgings, after a brief shared supper, trying to pretend that this was any other quiet evening spent in the balm of each other's company. “I suppose you'd better – ”

Combeferre didn't finish his sentence, but Enjolras knew what he meant, even without the slightly awkward gesture he made. “Allow me a moment, and then come in.”

“I'll knock.”

In his bedroom, Enjolras carefully removed his coat, and then his waistcoat, leaving them folded over the back of his chair. Next his shoes, and then his stockings, and then his trousers. He hesitated a moment over his smallclothes, but eventually removed them, too. Freed, his shirt billowed halfway to his knees. That would have to be modesty enough.

Combeferre rapped lightly on the door with his knuckles. At Versailles they'd been said to scratch, like cats; impossibly stupid, when a simple knock could be so self-effacing, and so deeply apologetic. “You can come in,” Enjolras said, and the door opened. “I wasn't sure – the bed, or the chair?”

“At the _hôpital_ , it was upon a stool,” Combeferre said, “but there was an orderly there, to brace – I suppose the bed would be more comfortable.” He generally discussed medical matters with detachment, and this discussion of the practicalities settled him.

Enjolras lay down on his bed, stiffly. Combeferre drew nearer with an oil lamp in his hand, and set it carefully on the bureau. He kept his grey eyes on Enjolras's face.

“You will have to raise your knees,” he said. It was gentle, but not unbearably personal. “Bring them towards you, and part them a little, if you will.”

“The part of patient is undignified,” Enjolras told him, but did it. He looked at the ceiling instead of Combeferre, and didn't start at the touch of a hand on his bent knee, repositioning him slightly.

“I fear it's generally so,” Combeferre said, as though they were still in the front room, “no matter the procedure. There's little left secret between a man and his phsyician; that's why we swear the Oath, and why we hold by it. You may consider my office as a form of confessional.” His voice went softer and less academic. “You had better tell me which you prefer. That we discuss other matters while I ascertain, and hold our minds apart – or that I tell you what I am doing, so that you are not surprised.”

“I would prefer the first – but I would rather not be blind.”

“I will explain, then, as best I can,” Combeferre said, and his palm was suddenly warm and flat on Enjolras's stomach, as though to prepare him for more intimate contact. It pressed down slightly, seeking secret shapes under his skin. From his frown, he found them. “I'm going to perform what's known as the _ballottement_. You're past four months, by your reckoning; that means that I should be able to feel the weight of the – of the fetus coming to rest when I tap sharply against the uterine wall. I am going to do so, presently. With your leave?”

“You have it,” Enjolras said, but nevertheless stiffened when the diagnostic fingertips left his belly and found his thighs. Stiffened further when they entered him, gentle as they were, and clenched his teeth when the brief, sharp push came deep inside.

“Did that hurt?”

“It's not precisely comfortable.”

“I apologise,” Combeferre said, his tone scrupulously distant. He could have been apologising for crossing another's path without noticing their direction, not for such intimate contact. He withdrew his hand and wiped it, carefully, on the sheet. Then he brought the hem of Enjolras's shirt gently down to his thighs again. “I'm sorry,” he repeated, and then laughed a little, unexpectedly. “I'm sorry – I don't know why I'm laughing.”

“Hysteria. A female complaint –”

“I've observed it in men. But I'm unlikely to get such findings confirmed among my peers.”

“No.” Enjolras paused. “I've never suffered from it.”

“No,” Combeferre agreed. He reached down to pat Enjolras's knee, then abruptly seemed to realise it was still bare, and that Enjolras's thighs were still white and naked below the drawn-down hem. His hand halted, as though touching Enjolras's leg would be somehow several shades more improper than where his hand had been a moment earlier, and he blinked several times. His neck was red. He was dear.

“I ask a lot of you,” Enjolras said suddenly, and Combeferre overcame his embarrassment in order to glance at him.

“What provoked that observation?”

“Just –” Enjolras gestured. “This cannot be what you anticipated, when I first asked your help. When you first helped me come to Paris.”

The corner of Combeferre's mouth dented slightly. “No,” he said. “I cannot say I ever imagined – but I cannot say I regret it. I have never regretted it, Enjolras.”

“Nor I,” Enjolras said, and in lieu of patting his knee, Combeferre stopped slightly to kiss his brow. For a moment, they were both quiet. In the silence, Combeferre drew the stool up beside the bed and sat down. At last: “It was there?”

“Yes. I felt the weight perceptibly.”

A weight indeed, dragging him down. Enjolras shut his eyes. “I wanted to take my pleasure like a man. Men do it; they don't care. It was only once – It seems so very unfair.”

“It is unfair. I’ve often thought so.”

“Childbed is dangerous,” Enjolras said, resuming their conversation of a few days previous. “I might die in delivery, or afterwards; I would rather risk my life in the attempt to rid myself of this burden. Doesn't my wish count for something?”

Combeferre's throat worked. “Yes. I wish,” he said. “I wish – if I knew I could do it without harming you, I would.”

“Isn't the part of the surgeon to effect healing by means of the knife?”

“Healing; but not always that.”

“Explain it to me as you explained the ballottement.”

“I've never performed one,” Combeferre said. “Nor seen one – only the aftermath of those gone wrong. However, I understand the theory. It requires – it requires, in effect, to persuade the patient's own body to pass the mass. To induce it, one must dilate the neck of the womb, as the body does for childbirth: to do that before time, a rod must be inserted through the neck and into the uterus. This is not pleasant, Enjolras; it is extremely painful. Thus the dilation; then the _curettage._ The curved knife, or the wire loop. An exceedingly fine sharp instrument must also pass through the neck – what we call the _cervix_ , from the Latin – and proceed to scrape what it can reach, and hope that in its scraping it manages to persuade the lining from the uterine wall. One is acting entirely in the dark; do you know how easily that knife could sever a blood vessel, or worse, an artery? If the latter, you would exsanguinate in moments; if the former, death could take considerably longer, and you might bleed your life away in slow degrees. That is not to speak of how easily the wall itself may be pierced, which is generally fatal. If successful, the rest would pass, hours or days later; and if you were similarly fortunate, completely, without further complication or infection.”

“But some are lucky.”

“I wish I was capable of lying to you,” Combeferre said wearily. “Yes, some are.”

“I trust you,” Enjolras said. “If it was you – I would trust you.”

In the light from the lamp, Combeferre lifted his hands and looked at them. They were beautiful hands, fit for a surgeon; tactile and curiously delicate, but nevertheless strong. Capable. You could lay your life in them. In the yellow light, as they both watched, the precise fingers shook slightly. 

Enjolras trusted him, and he felt that it could be, in its own way, a heroic sort of death. He would rather act and take his chance of dying cleanly than be forced to wait, and wait, as his belly slowly swelled, his body betraying him yet again. That was death by slow undignified degrees, death with all its glory torn away. A passive, pathetic fate. 

And yet – he wanted to give his life to France, not in some dark back room. _I will never forgive you if you ask that of me_ , Combeferre had said in clipped, precise accents. Enjolras had asked much of him over the years and never been denied. 

He reached out to take one of the beloved hands in his own. Combeferre clasped his in return unhesitatingly, something Enjolras had loved in him, from the first. Combeferre had never held him as though he was breakable. He had shaken hands when Enjolras first offered like a man, and never made a point of kissing his fingers or pressing them like they had no strength of their own.

He kissed Combeferre's knuckles now, and frowned when he caught the faintest sweet-sour scent of his own juices when he bent his head to them.

“Enjolras?”

“I'm promising,” Enjolras said. “No angel-makers; no unforgiveable demands. I'll bear this out, but I want nothing to do with it, if it lives. Is that acceptable?”

“My concern is you,” Combeferre said, squeezing his hand. The sudden easing of his shoulders, the taut muscle by his jaw, was perceptible. “Only that. You.”

 

**MAY 1832**

“What?” Enjolras said, face freezing.

“It was necessary. If you think on it, you’ll agree –”

“I trusted you,” he said, calm and damning. The past tense was clear.

“Enjolras,” Combeferre said, as stricken as if Enjolras had just pierced him through the heart. If Enjolras had a sword to hand, he might have. Instead, he used his tongue.

“I _trusted_ you. To betray me now, to Grantaire, of all people–”

“Indeed,” Combeferre broke in, putting an undue weight on his words. “To Grantaire, of all people. Of all people, hasn't he a right to know?” 

It was like being slapped. Enjolras was unable to keep from betraying himself; he flinched, and looked at Combeferre in disbelief, and then realised that the matter was irredeemable. No words could alter the certain knowledge he saw in Combeferre's eyes, or excuse his own sudden recoil. 

Combeferre regarded him seriously, sadly. His expression made Enjolras feel smirched. He said, gently, “Am I wrong?”

Enjolras wanted to deny it. He wanted make Combeferre beg his pardon for making such a suggestion on his knees - 

The hot anger left him as suddenly and absolutely as it had come, and he leaned against the mantel and bit his lips. At last, he said, “That was not your news to give.” 

“Did you mean to ever give it?”

“No.”

“Then I am sorry – Enjolras, I am sorrier than I can express to have lost your trust – but I don't regret it. It needed to be done.” 

That was said in Combeferre's medical voice. _That leg's bad; it'll have to go. I'm sorry, Madam, but your child is dead. That boil will require lancing._

Now Enjolras could be angry. “What good do you possibly imagine it will do? Do you imagine Grantaire proving useful in any way? Do you imagine that he has anything further to contribute in this affair than he has with our greater purpose; which is to say mockery, lassitude, and impediment?”

“Unkind,” Combeferre said, and glanced at the door.

He went still. “You're not telling me – ”

“I told him to wait in the hall downstairs, but I doubt he obeyed.” Combeferre raised his voice; now it matched Enjolras’s own tone. “If you're there, you may as well come in, Grand-R.”

A pause. 

Then the handle turned, and the door opened. 

Grantaire did not enter so much as sprawl. He put a hand to the door-frame, and slouched sideways, in a study after L’Aigle. “Judas,” he said. “Iscariot on every turn today, Father Confessor.”

Enjolras looked at him, noting the rare marks of sobriety.

A certain unsteadiness in the hands – it was curious that Grantaire was more deft when drunk – and a certain change in the eyelids. His linen was clean, his coat brushed, and his tie had been executed with more form than usual. He'd shaved cleanly, and even his boots had been wiped.

Then Grantaire looked at him at last, with a deliberate turn of his head to where Enjolras was standing by the fire. The rheumy blue eyes were unusually clear, and they fixed him where he stood. 

They stared at each other. Enjolras felt flayed open. Exposed when he had spent so long hidden, stripped naked in this room by the question in Grantaire's eyes. It seemed an impossible age before he remembered how to breathe. Then Grantaire passed a hand over his eyes and the moment passed, too. 

“Putain de Dieu,” he said. “I don't – No, looking at you now, I can't believe it. You almost had me convinced – What sort of game were you playing, between the two of you?”

“A poor one,” Enjolras said frigidly. 

“No game,” Combeferre said, quiet.

“Only _look_ at him!” Grantaire said, gesticulating wildly. “Tell me that that man-Madonna's mouth touched mine, and I will call you a liar. Tell me that young and scowling Mars is a maid – You can't. The illusion is too perfect, if illusion it is. An impossible Tiresias! What, lovely golden-winged Phanes wrapped fast in the serpent's coils – You tell me one thing. My eyes tell me another.”

That was gratifying, in its way, but Combeferre shook his head again. Enjolras drew himself up.

“I am female,” he said coldly. “By birth, if not in practice. What do you want, Grantaire? What good do you imagine yourself capable of doing here?”

“You exclude me,” Grantaire said. “Am I not concerned in this? Are you – Is there a child, Enjolras, and is it of my begetting?”

Blunt; terrible; unanswerable.

“I have the matter in hand,” Enjolras said. “I exclude you from it because I don't see where you enter.”

“Are you really mad enough to think you can hide a swelling belly and conduct a revolution? Do you think you can bear my child and the matter will be at an end? – _Is_ it my child?”

Unbearable.

“Of course it's yours,” Enjolras said, with sudden harsh passion. “Who would be a better father to misfortune? Who else could cause such chaos? _Damn_ you for it.”

He pressed his lips together and closed his lips on the rest of what he wanted to say, throttling the anger down. He took a breath. “I ask for nothing but your silence. Which should suit you - I ask you to be indolent. You're more than capable of that.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a terrible person; I forgot to thank **insipidity** for v. v. helpful advice and critique on this in, um, its embryonic stages, so to speak. Thank you, bb!


End file.
